Cameron Reynolds
Analyst · Lake Street Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Scott, and thank you everyone for joining Volition’s fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2016 earnings conference call. I’d like to thank you all for taking an interest in Volition at this pivotal time for us. I’m delighted with the considerable progress we made in 2016 in so many important areas. It really is incredibly amount of work a small dedicated team can accomplish. Starting with our strong and growing team, which is key to our continued success, we added several key highlights to our business starting in last January, with the appointment of Dr. Jason Terrell as our full-time Chief Medical Officer and Head of U.S. Operations. Having previously served in a part-time capacity with us, Dr. Terrell gives us perspective as a U.S. medical doctor, as well as the capability to plan our U.S. clinical work. Louise Day also joined our team in April as our Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. Ms. Day is responsible for the rebranding of the company and your website, et cetera, and of course, the marketing of our products. In June, we expanded the Board of Volition with the appointment of Dr. Ed Futcher, giving further depth to our independent directors, particularly with regards to the audit compensation and nominations and government’s committees. In November, we strengthened our leadership team further with the appointment of Dr. Philippe Willemsen as Chief Operating Officer of a wholly-owned subsidiary in Belgium. He has extensive experience in the biopharmaceutical environment and he’s certainly will placed as we ramp up our activities and launch our first product. I personally could not be happier nor more proud of our team we put together. We have an extremely talented and experienced team that is dedicated and committed to changing the way cancer is diagnosed. We’re also in the process of expanding the research team in Belgium. Moving on from people that staying in Belgium, we recently acquired a new 19,000 square foot custom designed office building and research development facility located in a Science Park near our current facility in Belgium. This facility is a significant increase in our previous footprint by almost five-fold and comes at a great value, including loans from the local government and from the local banks. This new home for our research team will hopefully allow us to greatly increase the amount of research and product we can produce. We intend to move into this new facility next month once the new lab is completely fitted out. From a product point of view, we made a decision early in the third quarter of 2016 to focus our resources on delivering our first product. This causes us to pause most of other research, so that we could attain the CE Mark as soon as possible. This focus proved highly successful, as we received our CE Mark on the first product, the Nu.Q Colorectal Screening Triage Test in December of last year, enabling our commercial expansion into EU. This opportunity was only presented to us in June of 2016, and we had a CE Mark product by the end of December. A truly remarkable accomplishment, which demonstrates our agility as a company to take advantage of new opportunities at a highly motivated and talented team. The focus we delivered allowed us to meet this crucial milestone in such a short period of time. Given how important the Triage Test is, I’ll give a refresher on what our first product is. Fecal tests are currently the most frequently used frontline screen for colorectal cancer across Europe. These fecal tests look for blood in your stool as a possible sign of cancer. Those who are FIT-positive, which means, they have blood in their stool then routinely sent on for follow-up colonoscopy. However, approximately 94.8% of people who test positive do not have colorectal cancer and have blood in their stool for other reasons, resulting a very large number of unnecessary colonoscopies each year in these European countries. With our CRC Triage blood test, which is then added to the FIT, we have the potential to reduce a significant number of unnecessary expensive and invasive colonoscopies, while also alleviating substantially the overburdened healthcare systems. With approximately 150 million Europeans of screening age and a total addressable market for our Triage Test of approximately 3 to 3.5 million blood tests annually in the year, this is a very exciting market and time for us as we launch this product. This is a market we’re initially targeting in Europe and we’re also looking opportunities in Asia for this test. On the intellectual property front, Volition was granted its fourth U.S. patent for its Nucleosomics platform and our ability to detect nucleosomes in circulation. This patent will support the first three patents that have already been granted, which collectively cover three of the four core epigenetic components of our Nucleosomics technology, including nucleosomes containing Histone Modifications, Histone Variants, and Nucleosomes adducts, as well as methods for detecting nucleosomes. We have overall a very broad IP portfolio. I’m also delighted that we’ve initiated two very important trials in 2016. First, we initiated the study with the world renowned Germany Cancer Research Center, also known as DKFZ, to evaluate Volition’s NuQ blood test for the detection of pancreatic cancer. This follows on from our successful early pilot studies in pancreatic cancer. If successful, this 750-patient trial could be a revolutionary breakthrough in the diagnosis of the deadly and difficult to detect cancer. Due to our focus on the CRC Triage Test in 2016, we paused this study with the samples banked in our laboratory. However, we currently plan to start again in this year 2017 and hopefully we’ll have some more news on this later this year. Second, in October, we announced the initiation of our largest clinical study to-date, which plays a vital role in expanding our clinical development program. This prospective study, again, in collaboration with the Hvidovre Hospital, University of Copenhagen, will ultimately consist of 90,000 blood samples collected from 30,000 patients over seven years, who have tested negative in fecal testing programs of the cancer screening tests. All blood samples taken will be examined with up to a 120 clinical pieces of information or data points, including such things as lifestyle factors and a wide range of other diseases, allowing Volition to use the study in a wider context for other cancers and it will lay the groundwork for our future product pipeline. I could not be prouder of this groundbreaking trial, as it will form part of the basis of much of the work we conduct going forward. On the financial front, we raised $24.9 million in 2016 through the public offerings, with $13.1 million in March and a further $11.8 million in October. From our investor relations point of view, we’re very, very active with Scott Powell and sometimes myself attending over 20 conferences in the calendar year. We continue to manage cash burn very tightly with an average quarterly burn rate of under $2.5 million per quarter and we finished the year with over $21.5 million in cash and equivalents on the balance sheet, which provides us with a very long runway from the process we’re going and it’s a record high for the amount of cash we’ve ever had at the end of the quarter. Now moving forward to 2017. We have already had a very busy start to this year, as is usual for us. In January, we announced the appointment of Dr. Jasmine Kway as Vice President of Asia. Dr. Kway will lead our clinical and commercialization efforts there. Our products aim to be at a price that can be used in many parts of the world, where expensive and complicated existing and development to tests will likely never gain any widespread use. We hope to have some further updates on the progress in Asia in the coming quarters. Like many of you who are listening to the call, we had a very busy week at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, meeting existing and potential investors, analysts, and collaborators. We had well over 60 meetings there and continue to follow-up on numerous and varied opportunities created for us during this very busy week. In February, at the World Congress of GI Endoscopy in Hyderabad in India, we presented the results of our validation study of the NuQ Triage Test. This data confirms that the role the NuQ Triage Test can play in accelerating the diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Last week, we started a two-phase logistic study of our NuQ CRC Triage Test. This study in collaboration with The Danish Research Group on Early Detection of Colorectal Cancer. Both phases are expected to be completed within six months. The first phase of the study started last week in the capital region of Denmark involves three centers and up to 250 subjects. The aim of this study is to evaluate the logistics in collecting and processing blood samples at a local screening center and subsequently shipping the samples to a central laboratory to run the analysis within Denmark. This phase is expected to be completed within two months. The second phase of the study is due to start after ethical approval and involve five centers and up to 500 subjects. Specifically, this phase will extend the time taken between blood collection analysis and results. When added to the existing clinical data previously announced, this logistic study aims to complete the information needed to add our test to the national screening program in Denmark. We’re delighted to be moving forward so quickly with our first product in Europe and look forward to updating you over the coming months regarding other EU and Asian countries that we enter. Given the traction we have shown in Europe with this logistic study, I’m delighted to announce that we have formed a new subsidiary bullish in America to focus completely on the U.S. market, as well as expand our attention to the all important market in the U.S. Dr. Jason Terrell has been appointed to head up this Volition America, and we look forward to updating you in the coming months as to our 510(k) and PMA strategy with regard to the U.S. FDA and also non-delivery funding opportunities of our team trying to attain in the U.S. Also, upcoming in the second quarter we look forward to a grand opening of our new facility in Belgium. This move is a significant expansion for us that gives us the ability to carry out additional clinical trials with our four Tecan machines in one place and expedite our sample analysis, and further to expand our scientific team and expedite commercialization of our blood tests. We expect to present the results of the full 8,000 subjects data of our NuQ Triage Test and look forward in the coming months to announce results from our other ongoing trials in addition to hopefully announcing additional trial our commitments over the course of this year. With the laboratory opening immediately in Belgium, which greatly increasing our bandwidth. We will also unpause the research and product development in a range of cancers beyond colorectal beginning with pancreatic. To close, I’m once again extremely proud of our achievements to-date and of our plans for this year. I’m also delighted that Volition is ringing the closing bell on New York Stock Exchange this Monday, the 13, at 4:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time. And we have numerous colleagues in New York for this very special event. This will also highlight the launch Volition America and of our NuQ product the Triage Test. Thank you all very much for the interest in Volition and for joining our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2016 earnings conference call today at this very exciting time for our company. We would now like to open up the call to take your questions. Operator?